1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a presence-based communication system, and in particular, to a multiple access presence agent.
2. Description of Related Art
Presence-based interactive communication systems enable presentities (e.g., users, services, devices and/or facilities) to publish, in real-time, their presence information, such as the availability and current status of the presentity devices/applications, to presence watchers (e.g., users, services, devices and/or facilities). The presence information can be used, for example, to assist the watchers in establishing real-time voice, text and/or multimedia communication sessions with the presentities.
Existing presence systems incorporate presence servers to manage the presence information for a plurality of presentities. Within the presence server are a number of presence agents, each responsible for setting, storing and communicating the presence state of a particular presentity. Presence agents automatically receive updated presence information from various presence sources, such as telephone applications, instant messaging applications and calendar applications, and aggregate the received presence information to reflect the presence state of the presentity. For example, when a presentity initiates or receives a voice call on his or her desktop phone, the presence agent is notified and changes the presence state of the presentity to “On the Phone.”
Access to presence agents is secured, typically by user name and password. Upon valid authentication, users have full access rights to the presence information of the presentity. For example, an authorized user may set the presence state of the presentity, view buddy list presence information associated with the presentity, set presentity preferences and perform any other presence-related function. Thus, for example, if a manager presentity provides his/her user name and password to an administrative assistant, that administrative assistant will have full access rights and privileges to the presence information of the manager presentity. However, in some situations, the manager presentity may want to limit the ability of the administrative assistant to view/change the presence information of the presentity. As an example, the manager presentity may want the administrative assistant to have access to only the business portion of the presence information, and not to any personal presence information associated with the manager presentity. Therefore, what is needed is a multiple access presence agent capable of providing different access privileges to different users.